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Theory, Culture & Society Theory, Culture & Society http://tcs.sagepub.com/ Freedom? Nothingness? Time? Fluxus and the Laboratory of Ideas Ken Friedman Theory Culture Society 2012 29: 372 DOI: 10.1177/0263276412465440 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/29/7-8/372 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University Additional services and information for Theory, Culture & Society can be found at: Email Alerts: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - Jan 3, 2013 What is This? Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Swinburne Univ of Technology on January 4, 2013 Article Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8) 372–398 ! The Author(s) 2012 Freedom? Nothingness? Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Time? Fluxus and the DOI: 10.1177/0263276412465440 Laboratory of Ideas tcs.sagepub.com Ken Friedman Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Abstract At the 50-year anniversary of Fluxus, Ken Friedman looks back on the activities and achievements of a laboratory for art, architecture, design, and music. This article examines the political and economic context of the 1950s against which Fluxus emerged to become the most radical and experimental art project of the 1960s, thoroughly international in structure, with women as well as men in central roles. The article examines the hermeneutical interface of life and art through 12 Fluxus ideas: globalism, the unity of art and life, intermedia, experimentalism, chance, play- fulness, simplicity, implicativeness, exemplativism, specificity, presence in time, and musicality. Keywords concept art, Fluxus, hermeneutics, intermedia Fluxus is not: – a moment in history or – an art movement. Fluxus is: – a way of doing things, – a tradition, and – a way of life and death. (Dick Higgins, 1997: 160) Fluxus is what Fluxus does – but no one knows whodunit. (Emmett Williams) Corresponding author: Ken Friedman, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia Email: [email protected] http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/ Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Swinburne Univ of Technology on January 4, 2013 Friedman 373 2012: Fifty Years of Fluxus The ferment and roiling wake of two world wars found many people who were not exactly artists looking for a way to understand and fit into the world. In 1945, Al Hansen was an American soldier in occupied Germany. One day, he found a piano on the fifth story of a burnt-out building. Al pushed it off. 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Fluxus Festival in Weisbaden, Germany. Since then, Fluxus has had moments of renais- sance, moments of invisibility, and moments of recognition that were widely misinterpreted. This is understandable for a phenomenon that has a namesake in Heraclitus’s doctrine of flux: ‘all things flow and nothing stands’ (Plato, 1931: 344). The half-century mark brings us farther from the birth of Fluxus in 1962 than Fluxus was from the birth of Dada. There were visible and significant similarities among Fluxus, Dada, and Surrealism. All were international, but Dada and Surrealism were only international in European terms. Dada had a modest, somewhat uncomfortable presence in North America, and no significant presence in Asia. The Nazi-era exile of European intellectuals and artists gave Surrealism a stronger American presence, especially in New York, but Surrealism remained a Western European phenomenon. In contrast, Fluxus was comprehensively international. Fluxus was a tricontinental forum of artists from Asia, North America, and both parts of Europe, East and West. It is telling that one can portray a history of Fluxus that centers either on Germany or on New York, but one can equally well write a history of Fluxus centered on Japan, or histories of Fluxus with a focus on participants from Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, or on activities in Canada, California, Iceland, Korea, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Norway, France, or England. Two factors made Fluxus resolutely international. One was a broad membership of key participants in all these nations and regions. The other is the fact that the Fluxus community saw itself as international in a world where funding for art, music and even film was generally national, along with gallerist and patronage networks. This made fund- ing difficult when projects inevitably included more participants from other nations than from the generally national funding agencies to which one might appeal for support. For the most part, whatever we did, we had to do for ourselves – a ‘do it yourself’ mentality infused Fluxus activities, both the work and the structures we created to make the work possible. If we shared some of this ‘do it yourself’ approach with Dada and Surrealism, we went much farther, building publishing firms, production companies, regional cen- ters, and projects that were surprisingly long-lived in contrast with the generally short lifespan of Dada and Surrealist journals and centers. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Swinburne Univ of Technology on January 4, 2013 374 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8) Figure 1. Flux Year Box 2, 1966.1 Screen-printed in black on lid. Purchased through the William S. Rubin Fund. Photograph ß 2012 Hood Museum of Art. Another crucial similarity was a heterodox relation to media. The Dadas and the Surrealists worked across art forms with cheerful aban- don, and this was the case for Fluxus artists as well. But here, too, Fluxus went farther. We were as likely to step beyond art forms entirely, or to make use of media that had never been considered art. This intermedia ethos became a central characteristic of Fluxus. But the differences between Fluxus, Dada, and Surrealism were more important than their similarities. In terms of art, Dick Higgins (1998: 217) described Fluxus as something that ‘appears to be an iconoclastic art movement, somewhat in the lineage of other such movements in our century – Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and so on’. But Dick and the other Fluxus people found it embarrassing to be labeled as neo-Dada. In their view, what ‘Fluxus people were doing had rather little to do with Dada’ (Higgins, 1998: 218). Unlike Dada, Fluxus was not as intense in its apparent anarchism. Unlike Surrealism, it was not an art movement. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Swinburne Univ of Technology on January 4, 2013 Friedman 375 Two major differences in the social constitution of Fluxus specifically stand out. One was a tricontinental membership, including women and men from dozens of nations. The other was the strong presence of women. This difference marked more than the difference between Fluxus and Dada or Surrealism. It was a difference between Fluxus and any community of artists that the world had seen before. Fluxus artists and composers would include a major group of groundbreaking women: Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Mieko Shiomi, Takako Saito, Shigeko Kubota, Alice Hutchins, Nye Farrabas, Kate Millett, Carla Liss, Alice Hutchins, Charlotte Moorman and others played key roles in Fluxus. While this revolutionary aspect of Fluxus has not been as well noticed as should be the case, more women were active in Fluxus, and more were central to the work of the community, than in any art groups before it. The feminist scholarship of Fluxus has begun, pioneered by such early contributors as Kathy O’Dell (1997), and special journal issues have begun to appear, such as the special issue of Women & Fluxus: Toward a Feminist Archive of Fluxus (see Fredrickson, 2009; Kawamura, 2009; Kubitza, 2009; O’Dell, 2009; Peterle, 2009; Yoshimoto, 2009). Alison Knowles and Yoko Ono have received significant curatorial attention, while Carolee Schneemann’s work has been given a significant revalu- ation focusing both on Schneemann’s work and on her intellectual influ- ence in the Fluxus era (see Stiles, 2010; Schneemann, 2002). Fluxus women made a radical contribution to the larger stream of feminism in art and public life, something unimaginable in the male-dominated Dada group and unthinkable to a group such as the Surrealists, whose reliance on sexual imagery and male fantasies made their group something of a phallocracy. Overall, a hopeful, proactive engagement with the world distinguished Fluxus from the far darker and often reactive worlds of Dada and Surrealism. Fluxus people had a sharp sense of the differences. Robert Filliou’s (1973 [1963]) outline of the Fluxus ‘program’ illuminated those differences in its playful simplicity. 1950–1960, etc.: Conversations and Constellations Many of the people who came together in Fluxus in 1962 and 1963 already knew each other. They had worked together in different projects and shifting constellations for many years. Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, and George Brecht studied musical composition with John Cage at the New School for Social Research. In the 1950s, Cage’s classes became a fountain of innovation for 20th- century art and music. In the years since, an ever-increasing number of artists and composers claim to have attended the class. Just as European relic hunters located enough wooden fragments of the True Cross to Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Swinburne Univ of Technology on January 4, 2013 376 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8) build a first-rate ship of the line, the number of artists and composers who now say they studied in the John Cage classes could fill a sports arena. The few who actually studied with Cage – or with Richard Maxfield, who taught the class after Cage – shared what was then an unpopular range of concerns. This was a time when abstract expression- ism was the most highly publicized tendency in visual art, before the even more materialistic medium of Pop Art replaced it.
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